Fast and efficient data backup is becoming increasingly important as the amount of data stored in data centers continually increase and as more and more people depend on data being available when needed. However, as the amount of data increases, backup performance may suffer. Backup applications have evolved to facilitate faster backups using techniques such as multi-streaming, block copies, snapshot awareness, federated backups, cluster aware backups, backups from proxy hosts, probe based backups, and other techniques to increase the speed and efficiency of backups.
Certain techniques and settings for data backup may work better depending on the performance capabilities of the host that is to perform the backup and the properties of the data to be backed up. A backup administrator can manually select the data backup techniques and settings that are well suited for a particular host and data set to improve backup speed. However, often times, the backup administrator does not know which settings to use to optimize the backup speed for a particular data set. As a result, often times, backup administrators configure data backup settings based on gut feeling or even by random selection. There are many instances where a different backup configuration setting from the setting manually selected by the backup administrator could have resulted in faster and more efficient backup.